“What will you do today? For Thanksgiving?” I finally asked.
Rose answered, “Eat here in the mess hall.”
Lorelei appeared untouched by the lack of real conversation. She hugged herself. “In California, we could eat Thanksgiving dinner outside in our garden.”
“The yard was forever green,” said Rose. “We had vines of red bougainvillea that overflowed the fence between our yard and the neighbor’s and attracted butterflies.”
“And we had an orange tree and huge Birds of Paradise,” Lorelei added.
I tried to imagine a place that was always green, where something was always blooming. The cold season on the plains had only just started, but those green days I’d enjoyed after my arrival now palled under a layer of ice and snow.
“The begonias and pansies bloomed most of the year,” said Rose.
“We also had a pond nearly covered with floating lilies and full of koi fish that grew to over a foot in length,” Lorelei added. “The water never froze.”
Still Ray hadn’t said anything. I glanced once in his direction to see if he was even listening. He must have taken my glance as a dictate because finally he said something. “Fishing from a pond year-round. That’d be nice.”
Rose’s face fell.
Lorelei put a hand over her mouth, but I could still hear her gasp. She said, “Oh, my gosh. I never thought of this before. Those fish were like pets to us. I certainly hope the new owners of our house knew that koi were not for eating.”
Rose paled. “Don’t even say such a thing.”
I said, “They knew.” When I looked over at Ray again, his cheek buckled in and he turned down his eyes. We chatted on about the weather and food; then, as the conversation was so strained with Ray around, I said we should be on our way.
“Long drive ahead of us,” Ray finally spoke again as we rose to leave. Then we wished them a happy holiday and left.
In the truck, Ray drove away in silence. Miles away, his body at last conformed to the seat. He glanced my way. “Sorry I said that about the fish.”
I bit my lip so I wouldn’t smile. “It’s okay” Now I could see the humor in the situation, but I doubted Ray could.
He focused ahead on the road. “What are koi fish anyway?”
“They look like big orange and white goldfish,” I told him. “They’re ornamental. People put them in garden ponds, just for show.”
Again, he glanced my way. “I didn’t know.”
Of course he didn’t. And how would he? “Don’t give it another thought.”
But for the rest of the drive out to Martha‘s, I think Ray gave it plenty of thought. Almost at their house, he said to me in a whisper, “I’m not any good with new people.”
“Ray” I turned to look at him across the pile of pies and casserole dishes. “In school, science was always my worst subject. One day in biology class, I was distracted, when all of a sudden my professor asked me to name the four chambers of the heart. I guess I thought I was back in English Romantic poetry, because I thought he had asked me to name the four ‘dangers’ of the heart. I pondered for a minute, then I said the first danger of the heart was probably falling in love.” I stopped and remembered my embarrassment. “Everyone in my class nearly died from laughter, except the professor, who asked me if I thought science was a joke.” I shook my head. “I had to force myself to return to class again after that.”
Now I had him smiling. “Sure enough?” he said. “You did that?”
As we drove on, I remembered how foolish I’d felt. I was mad at myself for weeks afterward. Dangers of the heart indeed. And how odd the way things had turned out. That love had come dangerously for me, just as then I’d predicted it would.
I stared out at the slick, icy road and remembered the days after Edward left. In only four days, I had mailed him four letters. I couldn’t sit still. I had to talk about it, so I met up with Abby and Bea. I remembered how we sat together in Father’s car at the drive-in, eating cheeseburgers. I told them every detail about Edward—our dancing together, his crooked smile and suntanned skin, his hesitant manner of speaking. How close I felt to my sisters on that day. All three of us, after all, were women in love.
In the first few weeks, it never occurred to me that Edward wouldn’t keep his word. When no letters had come in four weeks, I excused it as lack of time, his backcountry training, of course. Perhaps weather had hindered the mail delivery. But each empty-handed walk away from the mailbox put more weight into my shoes. Each day, I was beaten down lower, just as the flowers in Mother’s garden had been drummed into the dirt by strange summer hailstorms. At first I accepted that perhaps his feelings hadn’t been as deep as mine, but I still never imagined I wouldn’t see him again.
Edward had said he wasn’t much of a writer, so perhaps he’d telephone me instead. I started staying home all the time, just in case. As each day passed and as I realized that the unspeakable had happened, claws of despair tore me off my very bones. Not only had I suffered the worst loss of faith, I had created a problem unthinkable for me to have. I told Abby, not so much out of pain as out of panic.
Ray ground the truck to a stop in front of the house, and then he started lifting out the dishes and pies we’d brought to share. Finally, I moved, too. I found Martha busy in the kitchen making final preparations for the feast we’d all later share. Ray joined Hank somewhere outside, and Ruth helped me to don an apron. As she tied the strings behind my back, she asked, “May I touch the baby?”
I took her hand and placed it on the ball of my abdomen. “If you wait for a few minutes, you might be able to feel a kick.”
Ruth looked up at me in the way I used to look up to my professors. We stood like that until the baby, as if on command, shifted inside me and gave Ruth what she had been waiting for. Her face spread open in a smile. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “She feels so strong.”
“She?” Martha quipped as she steamed around the kitchen. “So you’ve decided this child will be a girl?”
Ruth blushed. “I can always hope, can’t I?”
A thought occurred to me. If this child turned out to be a boy, he would carry on the Singleton name for both Ray and Daniel. The Singleton name without an ounce of Singleton blood flowing inside him. “I wish for a girl, too.”
Before dinner, Ray tormented Chester and Hank Jr. with still another card trick while Ruth sat beside me and finally said, “You didn’t notice.”
I took a good look at her. She had a new hairstyle, a bob. “Oh, yes, I did,” I lied. “I noticed right away, but I decided to tease you and say nothing.” Now she smiled. “By the way, it looks lovely.” She turned her eyes down. “You look more grown up than ever.”
At the dinner table, we said a prayer of Thanksgiving. We circled a feast of ham and a stuffed turkey, nutty and fruity salads, peeled mashed potatoes with gravy, and sweet potatoes baked with marshmallows. Before she started passing around the dishes, Martha explained to me that in their family, they held a round of personal thanks before Thanksgiving dinner. “We each say what we’re most grateful for.”
Martha smiled, looked around the table, and began. “I’m grateful for all of you, of course. But I’d also like to say that I’m thankful this war is nearing its end. And I’d like to pray that never again should we have to go through another world war.”
She looked to her side, at Hank. He cleared his throat, then spoke, one elongated word at a time. “I’d have to say I’m thankful for the harvest this year.”
Chester said he was thankful for Christmas vacation and the time he’d have off from school, and Hank Jr. seconded his brother’s sentiments.
Wanda was going to be a woman taken seriously someday. She said, “I’m grateful that none of us has polio.” That holiday season, over twenty thousand cases had been reported in the U.S. alone.
Ruth, who went next, fixed her eyes on me. “The baby coming. I’m going to have a cousin!”
Then Ray, who seemed to have pre
pared his response, spoke. He looked over at me and said, “Daniel’s seat beside me isn’t empty.”
Ray had unruly eyebrows that, at that moment, I wanted to smooth out with the tips of my fingers. On the table before me sat Martha’s food, mixed of a kind of clan language I didn’t yet know. Something was gnawing at the fisted, beating muscle inside my chest.
I looked up. To my surprise, I saw that everyone was waiting for me. I hadn’t realized I’d be expected to take a turn. What could I possibly say?
I began searching my mind. It had to be something not too sentimental but meaningful, and certainly nothing that would come across as trite. In my classes during discussion time, often I wouldn’t hear other students’ comments because I was so deep in the throes of practicing my own lines. But here, I’d had no rehearsal time.
“Flowers,” I blurted out. “For the poppies in the field at Normandy. For the tulip bulbs that saved so many Dutch people from starving.”
I looked around at each of them. But they didn’t reply, nor did they move. I had gone last, but still, no one was beginning to eat.
“After a fire, did you know that red fireweed grows in and covers all the burnt ruins of the forest?”
Now I looked around at their faces filled with silent compassion and waiting for something else from me. “And for my mother. She loved all flowers, you know.”
Ray reached over and took my hand in his. And this time, I had no urge to pull it away.
Twenty-eight
That night, as we drove back from Martha‘s, exhaustion came over me. A rod of iron rode across my shoulders, and my legs felt as heavy as telephone poles. Perhaps the fatigue had resulted from my restless night before, or from the full day of travel, or perhaps because we had begun the day with that strained visit at Camp Amache. Or maybe the pregnancy was finally beginning to push its weight down on top of me.
When Ray and I came into the house, I set the empty Thanksgiving dishes on the table and didn’t bother putting them in the cupboards. Instead I washed my face and brushed my teeth, then bade Ray a good night. But as I stretched out into bed, although my body ached for rest, I found my eyes open.
Outside there was no wind. Instead I listened to pinging sounds coming from the pipes in the bathroom, and later, I could hear Ray’s rhythmic breathing coming from the bunkroom. I tried turning from side to side and clearing my mind of all the day’s events, but despite my attempts to relax, something was needling me. I closed my eyes and the world was green again. The plants of the summer past tried again to grow up, not out of the ground, but instead out of the center soil of me. The small of my back grew roots that twisted into the flesh.
I got up out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom. After closing the door, I turned on the light. The brightness of the bulb blinded me for an instant, then as my eyes began to adjust, I looked in the mirror. My former sunflower eyes now looked glazed over with a layer of dust. My face was full, and along the sides of my neck I could see bulging veins. I looked so bad it was almost exciting. I opened the medicine cabinet. Perhaps a couple of aspirin tablets would ease the pain and help me to sleep. I downed the aspirin and opened the door.
I met Ray, wearing an open robe, standing just beyond the doorway. “What’s wrong?” he asked me.
I wore only my nylon nightgown. Over these months since my arrival, often Ray had seen me wrapped in a robe over night-clothes, but never had he seen my body so flimsily covered as now I found it. I was aware of my engorged breasts pushing through the thin fabric of my gown and the curved melon that had replaced my waist. “My back,” I answered him. “I have a backache. I took some aspirin.”
“Maybe you did too much today. Hurt yourself.”
I started to move past him. “I’m sure it’s just fatigue.”
I brushed by his arm as I headed toward the bedroom.
“I could give you a back rub,” he was saying.
I turned around and opened my mouth to say it wasn’t necessary. But he was explaining, “Back when my folks were still alive, my father had the arthritis. At night, I’d watch Mom give him a rubdown.” He held up his hands. “I think I could help.”
The pain was now coming out of the small of my back and stemming down my legs in wild creepers and roots. Maybe he could help.
Ray followed me into the bedroom, where I stretched out on top of the covers and turned to my side. He sat on the edge of the bed at my back and put his hands on my shoulder blades. His hands were gentle, just as they’d been on that hooked fish.
“I hope they’re not too cold.”
“No,” I said and let myself sink farther into the mattress. “They’re not cold at all.”
He started by lightly rubbing the skin all over my back, warming it. “Where is it worst?” he asked.
“Low,” I answered. “Where I used to have a waist.”
I felt his breath on my bare arms. Now he took that skin over my lower back and rolled it under his palms. He kneaded and plied it until I could feel the root coils begin to unravel. I’d never have believed those callused hands could feel so good. Through the nylon of my gown, they had the same effect that the wonder drug morphine had once had on my mother. All unnecessary things went away, pain first. I hadn’t felt this good since Ruth brushed out my hair. I took a long deep breath and let myself start to drift away.
I don’t know how much time passed. I became aware of heaviness on the mattress, and when my eyes popped open, I realized that Ray had stretched out on the bed behind me. Now his body was big and warm just at my back. I felt him now, up against my buttocks, and he was hard. He was hard, but his hands, which curved around my arms, touched me lightly, gently.
“Ray,” I said.
His head moved up, and his mouth found my ear. “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t. I just wanted to hold you, is all.”
I closed my eyes again and let myself enjoy the weight of him behind me, the support of his body against my back. After all the nights I’d been sleeping alone, his body beside me made me think of animals curled together on hay in the barn. I began to drift back to sleep.
“After the baby comes...” he started.
Now my eyes flew open. Once before, at the Harvey House in La Junta, he’d tried to have this conversation with me.
“We can start over, you and me. Just like newlyweds.”
My body remained motionless, but my mind started unfurling.
“Could you feel that way about me?” He buried his face into the hair at the back of my neck. “Could you feel like you did about him?”
Now I was back in the weeks of waiting by the telephone and rushing to an empty mailbox. The questions that plagued me then were the same ones that haunted me now. What had happened after Edward left me for the last time? Had he met someone else, had he changed his mind, or was the worst true? That he never meant any of it. That he had seen me as nothing but an object of conquest, a nonperson whose feelings mattered not at all.
And what of me? Why had I trusted so completely? Why had I been susceptible to the seduction of a handsome man who flattered me, just like so many other girls I’d once thought myself over and above? Had it happened because of the grief after my mother’s death, or was I just fooling myself? Would it have happened anyway?
Now Ray’s hand was softly stroking the length of my arm. “I’ll wait,” he was saying. “For as long as it takes.”
I closed my eyes and wished for a gentler way to say it. “You deserve better, Ray.” Then I stated the obvious. “The child isn’t yours.”
Now his hand stopped moving. “Whose is it, then? On this farm, I’ve watched animals abandon their own blood kin for years. Blood ain’t the most important thing, you know.”
I closed my eyes even tighter. This was the reason I’d acted distantly to Ray ever since my arrival: to prevent this. I had no right to tempt someone so innocent and unexposed. Of course, Ray would easily fall in love. I had kept him at a safe distance until tonight. How could I have let this happen?
I could hear his breath catch and stop. “You’re a good woman.”
“But I’m not the right woman,” I whispered. “For you.”
Now he lay still for a long time. Against my back, his chest rose and fell. His hands, which had before felt so light on my skin, now felt like bricks. Finally he turned over and lifted himself off the bed, leaving me alone again.
In the morning when I awakened, I found all the dishes I’d left out on the table sitting untouched. No signs of breakfast, not even his coffee. The truck was gone, and I could see no sign of Ray anywhere.
Twenty-nine
Overnight, new snow had fallen, every inch of earth iced with dropped scales of angel wings. Even the grooves left by Ray’s tires were pure white impressions of tread. I found that his tracks headed toward town. Back inside and in the bunkroom, I found the lower bunk unmade. A rumpled pillow hung off one side of the mattress, and the sheets and blankets were wadded up into a punching bag. I opened his closet, half expecting to find it empty, but his few articles of clothing still sagged off the hangers just as before.
I let myself take a deep breath and, telling myself to relax, I also told myself not to be ridiculous. This was Ray’s family home, after all. He wouldn’t be the one leaving it.
Now I sat at the table and folded the same napkin over and over. If I had a car, I would go after him. But where would he go when he suffered? Would he go to Martha or to visit Daniel’s grave? Would he perhaps talk to Reverend Case? I tried to picture him sharing his pain with someone, but I couldn’t shake visions of the most likely scenario: that he would suffer alone.
The Magic of Ordinary Days Page 19
